Sean Thomas is a novelist, journalist and travel writer. He also publishes thrillers under the name Tom Knox. He is currently writing a memoir of his extremely misspent youth, and similarly misspent adulthood, and tweets under the name @thomasknox.

The Lego Movie is Better than Gravity. There. I’ve said it

Do you have kids? I do, and I confess that I sometimes wonder why – especially in light of the fact that I am a selfish layabout who would, in general, rather be in the pub. But then, as happened over this half term holiday, I remember there is one serious upside to contemporary parenting.

You get to see the best movies.

Childless readers out there may now be frowning in perplexity; I bet a lot of parents are nodding in quiet agreement. Because kids' movies – i.e. modern animated movies – are the best films around. And I don’t just mean “the best” in some playful but insincere way. I mean The Best.

When did animated movies get so inexplicably and jubilantly good? It’s difficult to say. Disney’s Aladdin with the hysterical turn by Robin Williams as The Genie was a marker, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (remember the yawning bullets? Or the fact some of us actually seriously fancied Jessica Rabbit?) was an even more significant threshold.

Either way, since then we have been treated to a giddying parade of animated masterpieces, from Toy Story to Cars to Monsters Inc to Tangled to The Incredibles to Finding Nemo to Ratatouille to Madagascar 3. Nor is this solely an American phenomenon, Aardman’s Arthur Christmas (made by the British guys responsible for Wallace and Gromit) is one of the greatest modern Xmas fables and The Triplets of Belleville was a dashing Frency sally against the follies of cyclists, and American obesity.

Yet America is the place where they make the finest animated features, and now Hollywood has outdone itself with The Lego Movie.

Yes, The Lego Movie.

The brilliance of The Lego Movie (right now the highest grossing film in America, and about to go AWESOME across the world) is evidenced by the fervent attempts to appropriate its genius by pundits across the political spectrum.

Me? I gurgled. I did, I gurgled with pleasure. I thought it was absolutely one of the best films ever made. Indeed I could happily have sat through the whole damn 90 minutes, all over again, if only my seven-year-old daughter hadn’t demanded a meal at Nando's, on the not entirely unreasonable grounds that I hadn’t fed her all day.

Funnily enough, the week before half term I was seriously advised by a culturally informed adult (indeed a maker of acclaimed adverts) that Gravity was one of the best films ever made. So I went to watch Gravity. And what did I see? Sandra Bullock being mildly moving, Clooney doffing one liners in a spacesuit, some nice floating-in-zero-G-stuff already done by Stanley Kubrick 40 years ago, and, er, that's about it.

And yet, despite this, Gravity, or Twelve Years a Slave or one of those other deserving, affecting, earnest, ever-so-slightly boring "proper" movies will win all the Oscars next week, and rich, complex, nuanced, hilarious, challenging, superbly plotted cartoon masterpieces like The Lego Movie will be ignored, or ghettoised, or given a condescending pat on the head. Because this happens every year. Because cartoons still don't count.

Why is this? Snobbery? Stupidity? Fear of our robot future, even in Tinseltown? Whatever the case, I am not sure this stance can be justified much longer. Because I am a father of seven year olds, so I know the truth. Modern kids’ cartoons, with their space pirates, exploding kittens, underwater monsters and cascading religious allegories charged by 3D hyperdrives are not just better than the rest, they are, at their best, in a league of their own.